Monthly Archives: June 2015

from The Washington Post, On Obamacare, John Roberts helps overthrow the Constitution by George Will excerpt: Since the New Deal, courts have permitted almost any legislative infringement of economic liberty that can be said to have a rational basis. Applying…

from the Wall Street Journal, The President Against the Historian by Bret Stephens: excerpt: But no Israeli concession could ever appease Mr. Obama, who had the habit of demanding heroic political risks from Mr. Netanyahu while expecting heroic deference in…

from the New York Times Sunday June 28, 2015, All in the Family Guys– an interview with Set McFarlane and Norman Lear: SM: Not today. If you make a thoughtful statement, or even ask a question about an uncomfortable subject today,…

“By now it should be clear how all this relates to the “improvidence of the poor.” Unfortunately, talking about the self-defeating choices poor people so often make generates a lot of discomfort, because it is usually the first step of…

From AEI Jonah Goldberg highlights the left’s incredible hypocrisy on race in Liberals are playing a racial shell game: So: We live in a world where Bobby Jindal is a fake Indian, but it’s racist to say an older white…

From Jonah Goldberg in National Review, When We Say ‘Conservative,’ We Mean . . . America’s founding doctrine is properly understood as classical liberalism — or until the progressives stole the label, simply “liberalism.” Until socialism burst on the scene…

from Scott Atlas at the Wall Street Journal, Repairing the ObamaCare Wreckage Why is private health insurance so important? Insurance without access to medical care is a sham. And that is where the country is heading. According to a 2014…

from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Why are market-based wages superior to government-mandated minimum wages? There are many reasons, here are three: well, here is one of the three…. b. Government Wages Ignore Economic Realities and Instead Reflect Politics. I…

from Petterico’s Pontifications, King v. Burwell: Intentionalism Trumps Textualism, and the Rule of Law Dies: excerpt: This reminds me of a hypothetical I offered in 2010: Assume you make $50,000 a year. The legislature passes a law imposing a hefty tax on…

from Bernie Sanders’s Dark Age Economics by Kevin Williamson in The National Review excerpts: Right now, we are embroiled in a deeply, deeply stupid debate over whether to raise the statutory minimum wage to $15 an hour. (I write “statutory minimum wage”…

From Rand Simberg at PJ Media, How Republics Die: As I noted on Twitter yesterday, it is entirely possible to like the outcome of a court ruling (or legislation) while being appalled at the process by which it was achieved.…

Without debating the substance of the ACA or the arguments used in the King vs Burwell ruling, the Supreme Court functions within a gray area. On one hand it should not be their purpose to correct or reject bad legislation,…

From Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal, Two Miracles in Charleston: That was the first miracle, the amazing grace that pierced the hearers’ hearts—in America, in 2015, at an alleged murderer’s bail hearing in a plain, homely courtroom. Christian…

For Madison, the ultimate goal of the new government was to balance different factions and produce public policy that was only in the public interest; for Hamilton, the goal was a vigorous government to spur the country on to national…

From Commentary Magazine, If He Only Had a Heart: John Podhoretz comments in Michael Oren’s Book: His dealings with the elite media were likewise unpleasant. He called the New York Times editorial-page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, after the paper published an op-ed by…

from The Volokh Conspiracy, Let’s recall why the Affordable Care Act is so messed up by David Bernstein: Few people, including Senators and their staffs, had time to read the whole 2,700 page bill, much less note any possible weaknesses,…

“Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. Ten years later we had…

From Jonah Goldberg in National Review, When We Say ‘Conservative,’ We Mean . . . Man is flawed. This world is imperfect. Youth is fleeting. Life isn’t fair. Conservatives are comfortable acknowledging all of these things. That doesn’t mean we are…

“So what are we to make of this unexpected persistence of capitalism? John Kenneth Galbraith once observed, with respect to American capitalism, that “in principle the economy pleased no one; in practice it satisfied most.”2 Behind this observation is the…

To be clear, the problem is not with expansive governmental powers per se. Rather, it has to do with the institutions of government that exercise those powers. Specifically, we use eighteenth century institutions, originally meant to do much less, to…